Yet now, close to the ranges where Sturt spent the burning summer months of his detention, there has sprung up one of the inland townships of New South Wales, where men toil just as laboriously as in a more temperate zone.
[Map.

Sturt's Route 1844, 1845 and 1846.] But, though baffled and unable to win the goal he strove for, never did man better deserve success.

The instructions that he received from the Home Office were, to reach the centre of the continent, to discover whether mountains or sea existed there, and, if the former, to note the flow and direction of the northern waters, but on no account to follow them down to the north coast.

Sturt was instructed to proceed by Mount Arden, a route already tried, condemned, and abandoned by Eyre; and he elected to proceed by way of the Darling.

His plan was to follow that river up as far as the Williora, a small western tributary of the Darling, opposite the place whence Mitchell turned back in 1835, after his conflict with the natives, an episode which Sturt found that they bitterly remembered.